Monday, June 30, 2014

Government announces campaign to combat atheism

Mada Masr

Thursday June 19, 2014

The newly formed Cabinet is planning a campaign to combat atheism, according to an official statement released Wednesday.

Neamat Saty, the Youth Ministry’s director of civic education, would
work with Ahmed Turky, the head of the Endowment Ministry’s mosques
management unit, and a team of psychiatrists to form a national strategy
to eradicate atheism.

Although Article 64 of Egypt's recently passed Constitution stipulates
that "freedom of religion is absolute,” the ministries plan on
“confronting and abolishing [atheism] through religious, educational and
psychological means handled by experts in these fields,” according to a
report published by the state-owned newspaper Al-Ahram.

The plan is part of a Cabinet-wide effort to “confront all issues that
negatively affect [youth] and hinder the steps of development towards
the future.”

Turky told Mada Masr in a phone interview that there is a protocol
between the two ministries to address various intellectual “threats”
facing the country’s youth.

“Previously, we launched a similar campaign against religious extremism
where we targeted 200,000 youth whom we saw to be most vulnerable to
such ideas, especially in Sinai,” Turky said.

He added that the two ministries are now hoping to combat certain
“intellectual pests” that target Egyptian youth, like atheism, asserting
that the scope of atheism’s reach in Egypt is still being determined by
a joint research committee.

“We are taking preventive and preemptive measures. We do not want to
see atheism being endemic in Egypt,” the official explained.

Turky pointed to the ongoing standoff between politics and religion,
and arguments concerning how those two realms should ideally interact,
as direct causes for an upsurge in both religious extremism and atheism.

“The ongoing conflict will lead youth to either be religious extremists
or push them more toward profanity and atheism,” Turky claimed.

But some say it’s problematic for state institutions to get involved in such matters.

Amr Ezzat, a researcher on religious freedoms at the Egyptian
Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), told Mada Masr that state bodies
are meant to serve all citizens, regardless of their religious beliefs,
and it’s extremely dangerous for them to launch campaigns against
certain religious views.

“If we are talking about a modern civil state, the existence of a
ministry that runs the affairs of Islam in the first place [the
Endowments Ministry] is problematic in itself,” Ezzat argued.

Initiatives like the one announced on Wednesday "do not simply campaign
against atheism, but they call for violating the rights of those
citizens who hold such beliefs in the first place, which is considered
mere incitement. These initiatives propagate that atheists threaten the
national unity of the society, while the existence of such religious
institutions at the first place is the threat,” he continued.

Belying Ezzat’s concerns are actions like the one taken in March by a
Ministry of Interior official in Alexandria, who declared that a special
police task force would be formed to arrest a group of atheists
residing in the coastal city who were open about their beliefs on
Facebook.

In a phone interview with presenter Mohamed Moussa on his television
show Redline, aired on the Honest satellite channel, Alexandria Security
Directorate chief Amin Ezz al-Din said that the task force would be
spearheaded by police officers with expertise in such "crimes,” and that
they would legalize arrest procedures against these controversial
activists.

The ministries’ campaign echoes recent attacks on atheism in local
media, a discourse that is particularly prevalent on private satellite
channels. In the same episode in which he interviewed Ezz al-Din, Moussa
called for the arrest and execution of an atheist he had hosted on his
show as punishment for his beliefs.

In another high-profile incident, a television host on the popular
Sabaya program, aired on Al-Nahar satellite channel, kicked her guest
off the show live on air for expressing her anti-Islamic views.

On a similar note, the EIPR issued a statement Thursday condemning the
6-month prison sentence levied against a Coptic teacher in the southern
governorate of Luxor. The teacher was found guilty of religious
blasphemy and defaming Islam.

According to EIPR, this is Luxor’s third court case against religious
blasphemy, with each case being brought against religious minorities and
those holding religious beliefs contradicting with the Sunni Muslim
majority.

In its statement, EIPR cautioned that "freedom of opinion and
expression is imperiled by individuals and institutions that seek to
impose moral guardianship on the citizenry, in a climate hostile to
liberties and supported by the governing authority."

The legal persecution of religious minorities is not unique to the
newly sworn-in government. Former President Mohamed Morsi’s yearlong
administration was broadly criticized for its perceived crackdown on
religious freedoms, as well as a wave of lawsuits against political
dissidents and religious minorities accusing them of insulting Islam.

Activist Alber Saber was sentenced to three years in prison by a
misdemeanor court in January 2013 for insulting religion after he
published a video on his Facebook page promoting atheism